Combating Gay Teen Suicide: What Parents Can Do

Combating Gay Teen Suicide: What Parents Can Do

Over the past few weeks it has been impossible to miss the flood of news stories about gay teens ending their own lives after enduring anti-gay bullying. Eighteen-year-old Tyler Clementi, 15-year-old Billy Lucas, and 13-year-olds Asher Brown and Seth Walsh were living in different corners of America — New Jersey, Indiana, Texas, and California — but each of them was subjected to the same kind of intolerance and cruelty, which included callous disregard for their online privacy.

I know that many parents find it difficult to discuss sexuality with their teens, but discussion is crucial if we want our teens to develop good self-esteem, embrace their own differences, and accept what is different in others.

A teen who believes his sexual feelings are unacceptable to peers may be experiencing emotions that are warning signs of suicide.

Parents, teachers, and all caring adults need to be alert and sensitive to how self-esteem contributes to a teen’s feelings of sadness, worthlessness, hopelessness, anxiety, irritability, rejection, and anger — all symptoms of depression that affect the majority of teens who attempt or complete suicide. Some parents fall under the impression that because they are tolerant of different sexual orientations, their children aren’t affected by the barrage of messages about “how wrong it is to be gay.” Unfortunately, anti-gay rhetoric has extraordinary, insidious muscle in the cultural landscape, and gay teens are particularly vulnerable to the discrimination and bullying that chip away at self-esteem and contribute to depression. Parents of gay teens are sometimes just “the last to know” a problem is brewing.

Therefore, it’s crucial for parents to start a conversation with their children, before they go through puberty, to discuss sexual feelings and tolerance of different sexual orientations. If your child is secretly feeling guilty or somehow bad due to the sexual thoughts he or she is having, you need to know this so that you can give reassurance that there’s nothing wrong or bad about different sexual thoughts or sexuality in general. Teens who feel uncomfortable with their sexuality often suffer from low self-esteem, so it’s essential that we counter their feelings of distress with a very positive message of acceptance and love. We have a responsibility and role in building our teens’ self-esteem and self-confidence. They need to understand that while we sometimes disagree with them — or simply have different feelings — we respect their beliefs and differences. We love them no matter what.

As part of the effort to prevent suicide and suicidal behaviors, parents need to know about their teens’ lives on the Internet.

I’m reminded of a scene in the new Facebook movie, “The Social Network,” in which Napster co-founder Sean Parker (played by Justin Timberlake) says, “We lived on farms. We lived in cities. And now we live on the Internet.” That we now “live” on the Internet means that, as parents and educators, we must be whistleblowers on Facebook, Twitter, and any other social media platform on which our kids interact — to tackle intolerance and bullying effectively. Online bullying often involves the complete failure, on the part of a bully, to comprehend how words and actions in cyberspace can devastate a victim. Erica makes this point in “The Social Network” when she tells Mark Zuckerberg that saying something cruel to a person’s face is like using a pencil (since spoken words can fade from memory), but saying something online, where words are recorded for an unknown number of people to see, is like using a pen. We have to talk to our kids about the power and consequences of our online behavior. And then we need to teach them how to use social media as a tool for promoting tolerance, compassion, and social justice.

Parent-teen communication is our best defense against intolerance, bullying, and teen suicide.

I’m encouraged by the fact that so many celebrities — from Cyndi Lauper and Ellen DeGeneres to Matthew Morrison, Jane Lynch, and the entire cast of “Glee” — are raising public awareness of anti-gay bullying and its links to teen suicide.

I hope you will join me in promoting tolerance to protect young lives. Please start right now by having a conversation with your child.

Harold S. Koplewicz, M.D. is a leading child and adolescent psychiatrist and the president of the Child Mind Institute.